Pandemic preparedness
Infrastructure-based solutions aligned with prevention, preparedness, and response needs.
DEWATS PPR Secretariat
Infrastructure-based pandemic preparedness, water security, and food-systems resilience.
Michael Apamaku is a member of the DEWATS Secretariat. The DEWATS PPR platform is described as an infrastructure-based, systems solution for pandemic preparedness, water security, and food-systems resilience.
Systems solution
Addressing pandemic risk, food insecurity, and water stress through an integrated platform.
Centered on decentralized wastewater treatment systems, the platform is designed to address pandemic preparedness, food-systems resilience, and water security while delivering multiple development co-benefits.
Its systems-based framing is especially relevant in environments facing declining resources alongside increasing and competing development priorities.
Water security
Decentralized wastewater treatment as a basis for resource resilience.
Food-systems resilience
Integrated co-benefits that support multiple development objectives.
The problem
Pandemic preparedness, water security, and food safety keep being funded as three separate problems.
Most pandemic preparedness investment concentrates on detection and response — surveillance networks, laboratory capacity, vaccine and therapeutic readiness. Those capabilities matter, and strengthening them is core consulting work for Livestock Futures. But they act after a pathogen is already circulating.
A large share of the pathogens that concern preparedness planners — enteric bacteria, viruses shed in faeces, and antimicrobial-resistant organisms — move through water and sanitation systems long before they reach a clinic or a laboratory. Where wastewater from households, markets, abattoirs, and livestock holdings is discharged untreated, that pathway stays open. It contaminates irrigation water, it contaminates the produce irrigated with it, and it recirculates resistance genes between human, animal, and environmental compartments. This is One Health in its most literal form: the same water carries the risk across all three.
Centralised sewerage is the conventional answer, and in much of Africa and South Asia it is not a realistic one at the scale or timeline required. Trunk infrastructure is capital-intensive, slow to build, and poorly matched to dispersed peri-urban settlements and rural market towns — which is precisely where livestock, people, and untreated effluent are most densely mixed.
The approach
Decentralised treatment as preparedness infrastructure, not just sanitation.
Decentralised wastewater treatment systems (DEWATS) treat effluent close to where it is generated, using largely passive, low-energy processes that can be operated without specialist staff. Individually they are modest. Deployed deliberately at the points where contamination risk concentrates — abattoirs, livestock markets, dairy hubs, health facilities, schools, food processing sites — they change the risk profile of a whole catchment.
The platform’s argument is that this infrastructure should be appraised as multi-purpose rather than single-purpose. The same asset interrupts a transmission pathway, recovers water for productive use, and reduces the effluent load on downstream food production. Funded as sanitation alone it looks marginal. Funded against its combined preparedness, water, and food-systems benefits, the case is considerably stronger — and it becomes eligible for a wider set of financing windows.
That framing matters most in exactly the settings the platform targets: places facing declining resources alongside increasing and competing development priorities, where a single-benefit investment rarely survives the budget process.
Interrupts transmission upstream
Reduces environmental circulation of enteric pathogens and antimicrobial-resistant organisms before they become clinical caseloads.
Recovers water and nutrients
Treated effluent and residual nutrients can be returned to productive use, easing pressure on stressed sources.
Protects the food chain
Cleaner irrigation and processing water lowers contamination risk in fresh produce and animal-source foods.
Deployable at realistic cost
Modular, low-energy systems can be installed where risk concentrates without waiting for trunk sewerage.
Livestock Futures’ role
Connecting the platform to animal health, One Health, and investment design.
Michael Apamaku is a member of the DEWATS Secretariat, contributing the animal health and livestock-systems perspective: where livestock production and processing create the highest contamination risk, how those points relate to zoonotic and antimicrobial resistance pathways, and how the resulting benefits can be expressed in terms an investment appraisal will accept.
The practical work is the same discipline applied elsewhere by the practice — turning a systems argument into a results framework, a measurable set of outcomes, and a financeable proposition, then testing whether the evidence genuinely supports the claim being made.
[VERIFY: confirm the Secretariat’s host institution, partner organisations, target countries, and any current pilot sites you want named on this page.]
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